Thank you, Minister, for your statement and the advance copy of it that you shared with me.

I have to say that I'm not adverse to making changes to the voting system. I'm not adverse to making changes to electoral administration, or indeed, reform, if that is necessary. But we do have a successful record of delivering fair elections here in Wales, as we do in other parts of the United Kingdom. It's not complicated, it works and it delivers results. We don't always achieve the sort of turnout that we would like to achieve, and that is a challenge, and I think it's something that we have to look to ourselves to sort out, in terms of inspiring the electorate to turn out at elections. You can't force people to use the vote that they're eligible to cast, and we've got to take and accept some responsibility for not, perhaps, inspiring them enough.

But I don't necessarily see the need for all of the proposed changes that you're putting forward in the White Paper, nor do I see this as being an area that ought to potentially be sucking up all of the Welsh Government's time in terms of its legislative priorities. There are many other things that the Welsh Government could be getting on with, but for some reason, you seem to be focusing on things that are not necessarily the priority of members of the public. 

So, we have a situation where you embarked upon your early voting pilots earlier this year; frankly, they were a disaster—they were an absolute, unmitigated disaster. You spent £1.5 million—£845 per person who voted early. That was the outcome. And the turnout in those areas that had the early voting pilots actually went down, and it went down by more than the actual turnout across Wales as a whole went down. So, it went down even further than the 3 per cent across Wales as a whole. So, that's not a success. So, you have one question, I think, resoundingly answered by the spectacular failure of those early voting pilots in that you should not be taking forward any further prospect of early voting in the future. 

You've talked, in your White Paper, about automatic voter registration. Now, to me, it's not clear why this might be necessary. Many millions of people in Wales register to vote with the current voting registration system without any issues at all. And of course there are some challenges that are thrown up by automatic voter registration. You could end up with people being registered to vote twice, for example, at two addresses, with potentially an increase in the risk of those individuals voting twice in the same election—[Interruption.] Yes, of course it could happen now, but it's more likely to happen if you're automatically registered in two places at the same time. 

You specifically refer to students; the reality is that many students only want to be registered at their home address, their permanent home address, not their term-time address. Now, it's a matter for them if they choose to register at their term-time address. That's entirely a matter for them to be able to choose, but you're taking that choice away from people if you automatically register them to vote at their term-time address. It's not clear how you're going to overcome some of those challenges, where people might want to express a preference to be registered in one place over the other, and it's not clear how, in the White Paper, you'll address the potential for people to vote twice in the same set of elections when they're not entitled to. 

In addition to that, of course, there have been pilots that have taken place, roll-outs of automatic voter registration that have taken place in other parts of the world. In California, for example, there were 1,500 ineligible voters who were added to the electoral roll automatically as a result of the introduction of automatic voter registration there, and there were 84,000 people who had duplicate registration in California alone. Now, I know that California has got a much bigger population, and I'd love to go over there to see first-hand how it all operates, but the reality is that we don't want a situation where people feel, unwittingly, perhaps, as though they might have two or three opportunities to vote because they own two or three properties in two or three different places, or because they register during a term time at one abode and are registering at another time in another abode. 

I was disappointed as well, Minister—[Inaudible.]—Welsh Government to extending the franchise to more prisoners. I think that that's very disappointing indeed, that you still hold that position as a Government. I'm pleased that the UK Government is preventing you from doing that at the moment, and I just hope that there'll be no change in the UK Government, in terms of that attitude going forward.